A typical computer system may have a backup and recovery system for purposes of restoring data (data contained in one or multiple files, for example) on the system to a prior state should the data become corrupted, be overwritten, subject to a viral attack, and so forth. The backup and recovery system may include mass storage devices, such as magnetic tape drives. A typical magnetic tape drive is capable of reading from and writing to multiple tracks of magnetic media; and the tape drive may employ multiple layers of error correction code (ECC)-based detection and correction.